Social and Professional Issues in IT History of Computing

History of Computing
1. Predictions / Concepts

2. History of Hardware

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Computing hardware has been an essential component of the process of calculation and data storage
since it became necessary for data to be processed and shared. The first known computing hardware
was a recording device; the Phoenicians stored clay shapes representing items, such as livestock and
grains, in containers. These were used by merchants , accountants , and government officials of the time.

Devices to aid computation have evolved over time. Even today, an experienced abacus user using a
device designed thousands of years ago can often complete basic calculations more quickly than an
unskilled person using an electronic calculator — though for more sophisticated calculations,
computers out-perform even the most skilled human.

This article presents the major developments in the history of computing hardware and attempts to
put them in context. For a detailed timeline of events, see the computing timeline article. The history of
computing article is a related overview and treats methods intended for pen and paper, with or without
the aid of tables.

2.1. Earliest devices for facilitating

human calculation
Humanity has used devices to aid in computation for
millennia. A more arithmetic-oriented machine the abacus is
one of the earliest machines of this type was the Roman
abacus .

Babylonians and others, frustrated with

2.2. First mechanical calculators counting on their fingers, invented the
Abacus.

In 1623 Wilhelm Schickard built the first mechanical calculator and

thus became the father of the computing era. Since his machine
used techniques such as cogs and gears first developed for clocks,
it was also called a 'calculating clock'. It was put to practical use by
his friend Johannes Kepler, who revolutionized astronomy.

noted that multiplication and division of numbers can be

John Napier
performed by addition and subtraction, respectively, of logarithms of
those numbers. Since these real numbers can be represented as
Gears are at the heart of distances or intervals on a line, the slide rule allowed multiplication and
mechanical devices like the Curta division operations to be carried significantly faster than was
calculator.

previously possible.
Slide rules were used
by generations of
engineers and other
mathematically inclined
professional workers,
until the invention of The slide rule, a basic mechanical calculator, facilitates multiplication and division.
the pocket calculator.

2.3. Punched card technology 1801–

In 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed a loom in which the pattern being woven was controlled by
punched cards . The series of cards could be changed without changing the mechanical design of the

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loom. This was a landmark point in programmability. Herman Hollerith invented a tabulating machine
using punch cards in the 1880s .

2.4. First designs of programmable machines 1835–1900s

The defining feature of a "universal computer" is programmability, which allows the computer to
emulate any other calculating machine by changing a stored sequence of instructions. In 1835 Charles
Babbage described his analytical engine. It was the plan of a general-purpose programmable computer,
employing punch cards for input and a steam engine for power. One crucial invention was to use
gears for the function served by the beads of an abacus. In a real sense, computers all contain
automatic abaci (technically called the ALU or floating-point unit ).

2.5. More limited types of mechanical gear computing 1800s–1900s

By the 1900s earlier mechanical calculators, cash registers, accounting machines, and so on were
redesigned to use electric motors, with gear position as the representation for the state of a variable.
People were computers, as a job title, and used calculators to evaluate expressions. During the
Manhattan project, future Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was the supervisor of the roomful of human
computers, many of them women mathematicians, who understood the differential equations which were
being solved for the war effort. Even the renowned Stanislaw Marcin Ulam was pressed into service to
translate the mathematics into computable approximations for the hydrogen bomb , after the war

2.6. Analog computers, pre-1940

Before World War II, mechanical and electrical analog

computers were considered the 'state of the art', and many
thought they were the future of computing. Analog
computers use continuously varying amounts of physical
quantities, such as voltages or currents, or the rotational
speed of shafts, to represent the quantities being processed.
An ingenious example of such a machine was the Water
integrator built in 1936.

Nomograms, like this Smith chart serve as analog computers for

specific classes of problems.

2.7. First generation of electrical digital computers 1940s

The era of modern computing began with a flurry of development before and during World War II, as
electronic circuits , relays, capacitors and vacuum tubes replaced mechanical equivalents and digital
calcula tions replaced analog calculations. The computers designed and constructed then have
sometimes been called 'first generation' computers. First generation computers were usually built by
hand using circuits containing relays or vacuum valves (tubes), and often used punched cards or punched
paper tape for input and as the main (non-volatile) storage medium. Temporary, or working storage,
was provided by acoustic delay lines (which use the propagation time of sound in a medium such as
wire to store data) or by Williams tubes (which use the ability of a television picture tube to store and
retrieve data).

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Electronic computers became possible with the advent of the vacuum

tube .

By 1954, magnetic core memory was rapidly displacing most other forms of
temporary storage, and dominated the field through the mid- 1970s .

In this era, a number of different machines were produced with steadily

advancing capabilities. At the beginning of this period, nothing remotely
resembling a modern computer existed, except in the long- lost plans of
Charles Babbage and the mathematical musings of Alan Turing and others.
At the end of the era, devices like the EDSAC had been built, and are
universally agreed to be universal digital computers. Defining a single point in the series as the "first
computer" misses many subtleties.

Alan Turing's 1936 paper has proved enormously influential in computing and computer science, in two
ways. Its main purpose was an elegant proof that there were problems (namely the halting problem) that
could not be solved by a mechanical process (a computer). In doing so, however, Turing provided a
definition of what a universal computer is: a construct called the Turing machine, a purely theoretical
device invented to formalize the notion of algorithm execution, replacing Kurt Gödel's more
cumbersome universal language based on arithmetics. Modern computers are Turing-complete (i.e.,
equivalent algorithm execution capability to a universal Turing machine), except for their finite
memory. This limited type of Turing completeness is sometimes viewed as a threshold capability
separating general-purpose computers from their special-purpose predecessors.

However, as will be seen, theoretical Turing-completeness is a long way from a practical universal
computing device. To be a practical general-purpose computer, there must be some convenient way
to input new programs into the computer, such as punched tape.

For full versatility, the Von Neumann architecture uses the same memory both to store programs and
data; virtually all contemporary computers use this architecture (or some variant). Finally, while it is
theoretically possible to implement a full computer entirely mechanically (as Babbage's design
showed), electronics made possible the speed and later the miniaturization that characterises modern
computers.

There were three, parallel streams of computer development in the World War II era, and two were
either largely ignored or were deliberately kept secret. The first was the German work of Konrad Zuse.
The second was the secret development of the Colossus computer in the UK. Neither of these had much
influence on the various computing projects in the United States. After the war British and American
computing researchers cooperated on some of the most important steps towards a practical
computing device.

2.8. American developments

In 1937, Claude Shannon produced his master's thesis at MIT that implemented Boolean algebra using
electronic relays and switches for the first time in history. Entitled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and
Switching Circuits, Shannon's thesis essentially founded practical digital circuit design.

In November of 1937, George Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs, completed a relay-based computer he
dubbed the "Model K" (for "kitchen", where he had assembled it), which calculated using binary
addition. Bell Labs thus authorized a full research program in late 1938 with Stibitz at the helm. Their
Complex Number Calculator, completed January 8, 1940, was able to calculate complex numbers . In a
demonstration to the American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth College on September 11, 1940,

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Stibbitz was able to send the Complex Number Calculator remote commands over telephone lines by
a teletype.

It was the first computing machine ever used remotely over a phone line. Some participants of the
conference who witnessed the demonstration were John Von Neumann, John Mauchly , and Norbert Wiener,
who wrote about it in his memoirs.

In 1938 John Vincent Atanas off and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed the Atanasoff Berry
Computer (ABC), a special purpose computer for solving systems of linear equations, and which
employed capacitors fixed in a mechanically rotating drum, for memory. The ABC machine was not
programmable, though it was a computer in the modern sense in several other respects.

In 1939, development began at IBM's Endicott laboratories on the Harvard Mark I. Known officially as
the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, the Mark I was a general purpose electro- mechanical
computer built with IBM financing and with assistance from some IBM personnel under the
direction of Harvard mathematician Howard Aiken. Its design was influenced by the Analytical Engine.

It was a decimal machine which used storage wheels and rotary switches in addition to
electromagnetic relays. It was programmable by punched paper tape, and contained several
calculators working in parallel. Later models contained several paper tape readers and the machine
could switch between readers based on a condition. Nevertheless, this does not quite make the
machine Turing-complete. The Mark I was moved to Harvard University to begin operation in May
1944.

ENIAC performed ballistics trajectory calculations with

160kW of power.

The US-built ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and

Computer), often called the first electronic general-
purpose computer, publicly validated the use of
electronics for large-scale comput ing. This was crucial
for the development of modern computing, initially
because of the enormous speed advantage, but ultimately
because of the potential for miniaturization. Built under
the direction of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert , it was
1,000 times faster than its contemporaries. ENIAC's development and construction lasted from 1941
to full operation at the end of 1945

2.9. Colossus
Colossus was used to break German ciphers during
World War II.

During World War II, the British at Bletchley Park achieved

a number of successes at breaking encrypted German
military communications. The German encryption
machine, Enigma , was attacked with the help of electro-
mechanical machines called bombes. The bombe,
designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, ruled out
possible Enigma settings by performing chains of
logical deductions implemented electrically. Most
possibilities led to a contradiction, and the few remaining could be tested by hand.

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The Germans also developed a series of teleprinter encryption systems, quite different from Enigma.
The Lorenz SZ 40/42 machine was used for high- level Army communications, termed "Tunny" by the
British. The first intercepts of Lorenz messages begain in 1941. As part of an attack on Tunny,
Professor Max Newman and his colleagues helped specify the Colossus . The Mk I Colossus was built in
11 months by Tommy Flowers and his colleagues at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in
London and then shipped to Bletchley Park.

Colossus was the first totally electronic computing device. The Colossus used a large number of
valuves (vacuum tubes). It had paper-tape input and was capable of being configured to perform a
variety of boolean logical operations on its data, but it was not Turing-complete. Nine Mk II Colossi
were built (The Mk I was converted to a Mk II making ten machines in total). Details of their
existence, design, and use were kept secret well into the 1970s.

2.10. Konrad Zuse's Z-Series

Working in isolation in Nazi Germany, Konrad Zuse started construction in 1936 of his first Z-series
calculators featuring memory and (initially limited) programmability. Zuse's purely mechanical, but
already binary Z1, finished in 1938, never worked reliably due to problems with the precision of parts.

2.11. Postwar von Neumann machines -- the first generation

The first working von Neumann machine was the Manchester "Baby" or Small-Scale Experimental
Machine, built at the University of Manchester in 1948; it was followed in 1949 by the Manchester Mark I
computer which functioned as a complete system using the Williams tube for memory, and also
introduced index registers . The other contender for the title "first digital stored program computer" was
EDSAC, designed and constructed at the University of Cambridge. Operational less than one year after the
Manchester "Baby", it was capable of tackling real problems.

EDSAC was actually inspired by plans for EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic
Computer), the successor of ENIAC; these plans were already in place by the time the ENIAC was
successfully operational. Unlike the ENIAC, which used parallel processing, EDVAC used a single
processing unit. This design was simpler and was the first to be implemented in each succeeding
wave of miniaturization, and increased reliability. Some view Manchester Mark I / EDSAC /
EDVAC as the "Eves" from which nearly all current computers derive their architecture.

The first universal programmable computer in continental Europe was created by a team of scientists
under direction of Sergei Alekseyevich Lebedev from Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology, Soviet Union (now
Ukraine). The computer MESM (? ? ? ? , Small Electronic Calculating Machine) became operational
in 1950. It had about 6,000 vacuum tubes and consumed 25 kW of power. It could perform
approximately 3,000 operations per second. Another
early machine was CSIRAC, an Australian design that
ran its first test program in 1949.

In June 1951, the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic

Computer) was delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Although manufactured by Remington Rand, the machine
often was mistakenly referred to as the "IBM
UNIVAC". Remington Rand eventually sold 46
machines at more than $1 million each. UNIVAC was
the first 'mass produced' computer; all predecessors had UNIVAC I, above, the first commercial
been 'one-off' units. It used 5,200 vacuum tubes and electronic computer, achieved 1900 operations
consumed 125 kW of power. It used a mercury delay per second in a smaller and more efficient
line capable of storing 1,000 words of 11 decimal digits package than ENIAC.

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plus sign (72-bit words) for memory. Unlike earlier machines it did not use a punch card system but a
metal tape input.

In November 1951, the J. Lyons company began weekly operation of a bakery valuations job on the
LEO (Lyons Electronic Office). This was the first business application to go live on a stored program
computer.

In 1953, IBM introduced the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, the first in its successful
700/7000 series and its first mainframe computer. The first implemented high- level general purpose
programming language, Fortran, was also being developed at IBM around this time. (Konrad Zuse's 1945
design of the high- level language Plankalkül was not implemented at that time.

In 1956, IBM sold its first magnetic disk system, RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and
Control). It used 50 24- inch metal disks, with 100 tracks per side. It could store 5 megabytes of data
and cost $10,000 per megabyte. (As of 2005, disk storage costs less than $1 per gigabyte).

2.12. Second generation -- late 1950s and early 1960s

The next major step in the history of computing was the invention of
the transistor in 1947. This replaced the fragile and power hungry valves
with a much smaller and more reliable component. Transistorised
computers are normally referred to as 'Second Generation' and
dominated the late 1950s and early 1960s . By using transistors and
printed circuits a significant decrease in size and power consumption was Transistors, above,
achieved, along with an increase in reliability revolutionized computers as
smaller and more efficient
Second generation computers were still expensive and were primarily replacements for vacuum
used by universities, governments, and large corporations. tubes.

In 1959 IBM shipped the transistor-based IBM 7090 mainframe and medium scale IBM 1401. The latter
was designed around punch card input and proved a popular general purpose computer. Some 12,000
were shipped, making it the most successful machine in computer history at the time. It used a
magnetic core memory of 4000 characters (later expanded to 16,000 characters).

In 1964 IBM announced the S/360 series, which was the first family of computers that could run the
same software at different combinations of speed, capacity and price. It also pioneered the
commercial use of microprograms , and an extended instruction set designed for processing many types
of data, not just arithmetic. In addition, it unified IBM's product line, which prior to that time had
included both a "commercial" product line and a separate "scientific" line. The software provided
with System/360 also included major advances, including commercially available multi-
programming, new programming languages, and
independence of programs from input/output devices

2.13. Third generation and beyond, post-

1964

The explosion in the use of computers began with 'Third

Generation' computers. These relied on Jack St. Clair
Kilby's and Robert Noyce's independent invention of the
integrated circuit (or microchip), which later led to Ted
Hoff's invention of the microprocessor, at Intel. The microscopic integrated circuit, above,
combined many hundreds of transistors
The microprocessor led to the development of the into one unit for fabrication.

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microcomputer, small, low-cost computers that could be owned by individuals and small businesses.
Microcomputers, the first of which appeared in the 1970s, became ubiquitous in the 1980s and
beyond. Computing has evolved with microcomputer architectures, with features added from their
larger brethren, now dominant in most market segments.

2.14. Fourth Generation (1972-1984)

The next generation of computer systems saw the use of large scale integration (LSI - 1000 devices
per chip) and very large scale integration (VLSI - 100,000 devices per chip) in the construction of
computing elements. At this scale entire processors will fit onto a single chip, and for simple systems
the entire computer (processor, main memory, and I/O controllers) can fit on one chip. Gate delays
dropped to about 1ns per gate. Semiconductor memories replaced core memories as the main
memory in most systems; until this time the use of semiconductor memory in most systems was
limited to registers and cache.

During this period, high speed vector processors, such as the CRAY 1, CRAY X-MP and CYBER
205 dominated the high performance computing scene.

Computers with large main memory, such as the CRAY 2, began to emerge. A variety of parallel
architectures began to appear; however, during this period the parallel computing efforts were of a
mostly experimental nature and most computational science was carried out on vector processors.
Microcomputers and workstations were introduced and saw wide use as alternatives to time-shared
mainframe computers.

2.15. Fifth Generation (1984-1990)

The development of the next generation of computer systems is characterized mainly by the
acceptance of parallel processing. Until this time parallelism was limited to pipelining and vector
processing, or at most to a few processors sharing jobs.

The fifth generation saw the introduction of machines with hundreds of processors that could all be
working on different parts of a single program. The scale of integration in semiconductors continued
at an incredible pace - by 1990 it was possible to build chips with a million components - and
semiconductor memories became standard on all computers. Other new developments were the
widespread use of computer networks and the increasing use of single-user workstations.

Prior to 1985 large scale parallel processing was viewed as a research goal, but two systems
introduced around this time are typical of the first commercial products to be based on parallel
processing. The Sequent Balance 8000 connected up to 20 processors to a single shared memory
module (but each processor had its own local cache). The machine was designed to compete with the
DEC VAX-780 as a general purpose Unix system, with each processor working on a different user's
job. However Sequent provided a library of subroutines that would allow programmers to write
programs that would use more than one processor, and the machine was widely used to explore
parallel algorithms and programming techniques.
The Intel iPSC-1, nicknamed ``the hypercube'', took a different approach. Instead of using one
memory module, Intel connected each processor to its own memory and used a network interface to
connect processors. This distributed memory architecture meant memory was no longer a bottleneck
and large systems (using more processors) could be built. The largest iPSC-1 had 128 processors.
Toward the end of this period a third type of parallel processor was introduced to the market. In this
style of machine, known as a data-parallel or SIMD, there are several thousand very simple
processors. All processors work under the direction of a single control unit; i.e. if the control unit

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says ``add a to b'' then all processors find their local copy of a and add it to their local copy of b.
Machines in this class include the Connection Machine from Thinking Machines, Inc., and the MP-1
from MasPar, Inc. Scientific computing in this period was still dominated by vector processing.

Most manufacturers of vector processors introduced parallel models, but there were very few (two to
eight) processors in this parallel machines. In the area of computer networking, both wide area
network (WAN) and local area network (LAN) technology developed at a rapid pace, stimulating a
transition from the traditional mainframe computing environment toward a distributed computing
environment in which each user has their own workstation for relatively simple tasks (editing and
compiling programs, reading mail) but sharing large, expensive resources such as file servers and
supercomputers. RISC technology (a style of internal organization of the CPU) and plummeting
costs for RAM brought tremendous gains in computational power of relatively low cost workstations
and servers. This period also saw a marked increase in both the quality and quantity of scientific
visualization.

2.16. Sixth Generation (1990 - )

Transitions between generations in computer technology are hard to define, especially as they are
taking place. Some changes, such as the switch from vacuum tubes to transistors, are immediately
apparent as fundamental changes, but others are clear only in retrospect.

Many of the developments in computer systems since 1990 reflect gradual improvements over
established systems, and thus it is hard to claim they represent a transition to a new ``generation'', but
other developments will prove to be significant changes. In this section we offer some assessments
about recent developments and current trends that we think will have a significant impact on
computational science.

This generation is beginning with many gains in parallel computing, both in the hardware area and in
improved understanding of how to develop algorithms to exploit diverse, massively parallel
architectures.

Parallel systems now compete with vector processors in terms of total computing power and most
expect parallel systems to dominate the future. Combinations of parallel/vector architectures are well
established, and one corporation (Fujitsu) has announced plans to build a system with over 200 of its
high end vector processors.

Manufacturers have set themselves the goal of achieving teraflops ( 10 arithmetic operations per
second) performance by the middle of the decade, and it is clear this will be obtained only by a
system with a thousand processors or more. Workstation technology has continued to improve, with
processor designs now using a combination of RISC, pipelining, and parallel processing. As a result
it is now possible to purchase a desktop workstation for about $30,000 that has the same overall
computing power (100 megaflops) as fourth generation supercomputers.

This development has sparked an interest in heterogeneous computing: a program started on one
workstation can find idle workstations elsewhere in the local network to run parallel subtasks. One of
the most dramatic changes in the sixth generation will be the explosive growth of wide area
networking. Network bandwidth has expanded tremendously in the last few years and will continue
to improve for the next several years. T1 transmission rates are now standard for regional networks,
and the national ``backbone'' that interconnects regional networks uses T3.

Networking technology is becoming more widespread than its original strong base in universities and
government laboratories as it is rapidly finding application in K-12 education, community networks

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and private industry. A little over a decade after the warning voiced in the Lax report, the future of a
strong computational science infrastructure is bright.

The federal commitment to high performance computing has been further strengthened with the
passage of two particularly significant pieces of legislation: the High Performance Computing Act of
1991, which established the High Performance Computing and Communication Program (HPCCP)
and Sen. Gore's Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992, which addresses a broad
spectrum of issues ranging from high performance computing to expanded network access and the
necessity to make leading edge technologies available to educators from kindergarten through
graduate school.

In bringing this encapsulated survey of the development of a computational science infrastructure up

to date, we observe that the President's FY 1993 budget contains $2.1 billion for mathematics,
science, technology and science literacy educational programs, a 43% increase over FY 90 figures

3. History of Software

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3.1. Introduction
A simple question: "What is software?" A very simple answer is: Hardware you can touch, software
you can't. But that is too simple indeed.

When talking about software we talk about programming and programming languages and about
producing and selling the products made by programming (languages) which are called “Software”.

3.2. How It All Started

It shouldn't be a big surprise that the creation or software also went in large but distinguishable steps.
Compared with hardware there were fewer developments that went parallel or overlapping. In rare
cases developments were reinvented sometimes because the development or invention was not
published, even prohibited to be made public (war, secrecy acts etc.) or became known at the same
time and after (legal) discussions the "other" party won the honors.

The earliest practical form of programming was probably done by Jaquard (1804, France). He
designed a loom that performed predefined tasks through feeding punched cards into a reading
contraption.

This picture shows the manufacturing of punched cards for

looms

The technology of punched cards will later be adapted by

(IBM's) Recording and Tabulating Company to process data
A problem needed to be solved thus a machine was built.
(Pascal, Babbage, Scheultz & Son) And it required some sort
of instruction; a sequence was designed or written and
transferred to either cards or mechanical aids such as wires,
gears, shafts actuators etc. This was the birth of programming.
First Ada Lovelace, was writing a rudimentary program (1843)
for the Analytical Machine, designed by Charles Babbage in
1827, but the machine never came into operation.

Then there was George Boole (1815-1864), a British

mathematician, who proved the relation between mathematics
and logic with his algebra of logic (BOOLEAN algebra or binary logic) in 1847.This meant a
breakthrough for mathematics. Boole was the first to prove that logic is part of mathematics and not of philosophy.

3.2.1. A big step in thinking

But it took one hundred years before this algebra of logic was put to work for computing. It took
Claude Shannon (1916-2001) who wrote a thesis (A Mathematical Theory of Communication in the
Bell System Technical Journal -1948) on how binary logic could be used in computing to complete
the software concept of modern computing. Now things were in place to start off with the
information age.

3.2.2. Enter the Information Age

In the beginning of the so called "Information Age" computers were programmed by "programming"
direct instructions into it. This was done by setting switches or making connections to different
logical units by wires (circuitry).

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Programming like this was nothing else but

rewiring these huge machines in order to use all
the options, possibilities and calculations.
Reprogramming always meant rewiring.

In that way calculations needed days of

preparations, handling thousands of wires,
resetting switches, plugs etc. (in the most
extreme case that is). And the programmed
calculation itself just took a few minutes. If the
"programming" of wiring did not have a wrong
connection, the word bug was not in used yet,
for programming errors.

The coding panels very much looked like that a

few telephone switchboards hustled together,
and in fact many parts actually came from
switch boards.
Two women wiring the right side of the ENIAC with a
new program (US Army photo, from archives of the
With the invention of vacuum tubes, along with ARL Technical library, courtesy of Mike Muuss)
many other inventions, much of the rewiring
belonged to the past. The tubes replaced the slow machines based on relays.

When Shannon reinvented or better rediscovered the binary calculus in 1948 and indicated how that
could be used for computing a revolution started. The race was on!

First programming was done by typing in 1's or 0's that were stored on different information carriers.
Like paper tapes, punched hole cards, hydrogen delay lines (sound or electric pulse) and later
magnetic drums and much later magnetic and optical discs.

By storing these 0's and 1's on a carrier (first used by Karl Suze's X1 in 1938) it was possible to have
the computer read the data on any later time. But mis typing a single zero or one meant a disaster
because all coding (instructions) should absolutely be on the right place and in the right order in
memory. This technology was called absolute addressing.
An example:
1010010101110101011

If this is a sequence for switches it means switch one on, switch two off etc. etc.

In the early 50's programmers started to let the machines do a part of the job. This was called
automatic coding and made live a lot easier for the early programmers.

The next development was to combine groups of instruction into so called words and abbreviations
were thought up called: opcodes (Hopper 1948)

3.2.3. Machine Language

Opcode works like a shorthand and represents as said a group of machine instructions. The opcode is
translated by another program into zero's and one's, something a machine could translate into
instructions. But the relation is still one to one: one code to one single instruction. However very
basically this is already a programming language. It was called: assembly language.

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An example:

Label Opcode Register

CALC: STO R1, HELP0
STO R2, HELP2
LD R3, HELP1
ADD R3, HELP2
LD R4, HELP1
SUB R4, HELP2
RSR SP, 0
HELP1: DS 2
HELP2: DS 2

This piece of assembly code calculates the difference between two numbers.

3.2.4. Subroutines

Soon after developing machine languages and the first crude programming languages began to
appear the danger of inextricable and thus unreadable coding became apparent. Later this messy
programming was called: "spaghetti code".

One important step in unraveling or preventing spaghetti code was the development of subroutines.
And it needed Maurice Wilkes, when realizing that "a good part of the remainder of his life was
going to be spent in finding errors in ... programs", to develop the concept of subroutines in programs
to create reusable modules. Together with Stanley Gill and David Wheeler he produced the first
textbook on "The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer". The formalized
concept of software development (not named so for another decade) had its beginning in 1951.

Fortran

The next big step in programming began when an IBM team under John W. Backus created
FORTRAN - FORmula TRANslator 1952. It could only be used on their own machine, the: IBM
704. But later versions for other machines, and platforms were sold soon after. Until long past 1960
different CPU's required an other kind instruction set to add a number, thus for each different
machine a different compiler was needed. Typically the manual came years later in 1957!

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Programming language

FORTRAN soon was called a programming

language. This was because some
characteristics of a language are met:

• It must have a vocabulary - list of

words
• It must have a grammar - or syntax
• It must be unique, both in words and
in context

All the above criteria were easily met for

this - strictly defined- set of computer
instructions.
An example:

Enter "C"

C came into being in the years 1969-1973

and was developed by Dennis Richey and David Kerningham both working at the Bell laboratories.
And the magic word was portability. Parallel at the development of computer languages, Operating
Systems (OS) were developed. These were needed because to create programs and having to write all
machine specific instructions over and over again was a "waste of time" job. So by introducing the
OS 'principle' almost all input and output tasks were taken over by the OS.
Such as:

• writing data to and from memory,

• saving data on disks,
• writing data to screens and printers,
• starting tapes,
• refreshing memory,
• scheduling specific tasks
• etcetera, etcetera.

As the common computer languages had trouble to be translated from one machine to another the
OS's had to take the same hurdle every time a new machine was developed. The need and pressure
for a common portable language was enormous. There were some unsuccessful projects aimed to
solve this problem, like Multics, a joint venture of MIT, General Electric, and Bell Labs. And other
developments at DOD's in different countries. But they all came either too late or became too
complex to succeed.

But the demise of Multics inspired Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernigham to develop C in 1972. This
was and still is a very strict language that stayed close enough to the machine's internal logic and
structure. This new language was reasonable well to read and understand by humans. And because of

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this combination the language is fast, compact and became very popular amongst system
programmers and commercial software manufacturers.

With that language they also developed UNIX, a generic operating system.

The power of C was that the language had a small language base (vocabulary) but leaned heavily on
what they called libraries. Libraries contain machine specific instructions to perform tasks, like the
OS does. These libraries were the only parts that had to be redesigned for different machines, or
processor families. But, and that was C's strength, the programming interface/language remained the
same. Portability was born. Source code could be reused, only to be recompiled when it had to run
on other machines.

A classic example of C, printing "Hello World" on your screen:

/* helloworld.c */

main()
{
printf('Hello
World\n");
}
Soon other language manufacturers sprang on the bandwagon and the software industry leaped
ahead. The industry took off like a rocket!

Predecessor(s) Year Name Chief Developer, Company

Pre 1950
* ~1840 first program Ada Lovelace
* 1945 Plankalkül (concept) Konrad Zuse

1950s
* 1952 A-0 Grace Hopper
* 1954 Mark I Autocode Tony Brooker
A-0 1954-1955 FORTRAN "0" (concept) John W. Backus at IBM
A-0 1954 ARITH -MATIC Grace Hopper
A-0 1954 MATH -MATIC Grace Hopper
* 1954 IPL V (concept) Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, Herbert Simon
A-0 1955 FLOW-MATIC Grace Hopper
IPL 1956-1958 LISP (concept) John McCarthy
FLOW -MATIC 1957 COMTRAN Bob Bemer
FORTRAN 0 1957 FORTRAN "I" (implementation) John W. Backus at IBM
* 1957 COMIT (concept)
FORTRAN I 1958 FORTRAN II John W. Backus at IBM
FORTRAN 1958 ALGOL 58 (IAL) International effort
* 1958 IPL V (implementation) Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, Herbert Simon
FLOW -MATIC, COMTRAN 1959 COBOL (concept) The Codasyl Committee
IPL 1959 LISP (implementation) John McCarthy
1959 TRAC (concept) Mooers

1960s
ALGOL 58 1960 ALGOL 60
FLOW -MATIC, COMTRAN 1960 COBOL 61 (implementation) The Codasyl Committee
* 1961 COMIT (implementation)
FORTRAN II 1962 FORTRAN IV

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* 1962 APL (concept) Iverson

ALGOL 58 1962 MAD Arden, et. al.
ALGOL 60 1962 SIMULA (concept)
FORTRAN II, COMIT 1962 SNOBOL Griswold, et al.
ALGOL 60 1963 CPL Barron, Strachey, et al.
SNOBOL 1962 SNOBOL4 (concept) Griswold, et al.
ALGOL 60 1963 ALGOL 68 (concept) van Wijngaarden, et al.
ALGOL 58 1963 JOSS I Cliff Shaw, RAND
CPL, LISP 1964 COWSEL Burstall, Popplestone
ALGOL 60, COBOL, FORTRAN 1964 PL/I (concept) IBM
FORTRAN II, JOSS 1964 BASIC Kemeny and Kurtz
1964 TRAC (implementation) Mooers
1964? IITRAN
JOSS 1965 TELCOMP BBN
JOSS I 1966 JOSS II Chuck Baker, RAND
FORTRAN IV 1966 FORTRAN 66
LISP 1966 ISWIM Landin
ALGOL 60 1966 CORAL66
CPL 1967 BCPL Richards
FORTRAN, TELCOMP 1967 MUMPS Massachusetts General Hospital
* 1967 APL (implementation) Iverson
ALGOL 60 1967 SIMULA 67 (implementation) Dahl, Myhrhaug,Nygaard at Norsk Regnesentral
SNOBOL 1967 SNOBOL4 (implementation) Griswold, et al.
COWSEL 1968 POP-1 Burstall, Popplestone
1968 FORTH (concept) Moore
LISP 1968 LOGO Papert
ALGOL 60 1969 ALGOL 68 (implementation) van Wijngaarden, et al.
ALGOL 60, COBOL, FORTRAN 1969 PL/I (implementation) IBM

1970s
1970? FORTH (implementation) Moore
POP-1 1970 POP-2
ALGOL 60 1971 Pascal Wirth, Jensen
SIMULA 67 1972 Smalltalk-72 Xerox PARC
B, BCPL, ALGOL 68 1972 C Ritchie
* 1972 INTERCAL
2-level W-Grammar 1972 Prolog Colmerauer
Pascal, BASIC 1973 COMAL Christensen, Løfstedt
BASIC 1974 GRASS DeFanti
Business BASIC 1974 BASIC FOUR BASIC FOUR CORPORATION
LISP 1975 Scheme Sussman, Steele
Pascal 1975? Modula Wirth
BASIC 1975 Altair BASIC Gates, Allen
Smalltalk-72 1976 Smalltalk-76 Xerox PARC
C, FORTRAN 1976 Ratfor Kernighan
* 1977 FP John Backus
* 1977 Bourne Shell (sh) Bourne
MUMPS 1977 Standard MUMPS
FORTRAN IV 1978 FORTRAN 77
Modula 1978? Modula-2 Wirth
* 1978? MATLAB Moler at the University of New Mexico
* 1978 VISICALC Bricklin , Frankston at VisiCorp
PL/I, BASIC, EXEC 2 1979 REXX Cowlishaw
C, SNOBOL 1979 Awk Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan
* 1979 Vulcan dBase-II Ratliff
ALGOL 68 1979 Green Ichbiah et al. at US Dept of Defense

1980s
C, SIMULA 67 1980 C with Classes Stroustrup
Smalltalk-76 1980 Smalltalk-80 Xerox PARC
Smalltalk, C 1982 Objective -C Brad Cox
Green 1983 Ada 83 U.S. Department of Defense
C with Classes 1983 C++ Stroustrup

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Pascal 1983 Turbo Pascal Hejlsberg

BASIC 1983 True BASIC Kemeny, Kurtz at Dartmouth University
sh 1984? Korn Shell (ksh) Dave Korn
* 1984 Standard ML
dBase 1984 CLIPPER Nantucket
LISP 1984 Common Lisp Guy Steele and many others
1977MUMPS 1985 1984 MUMPS
dBase 1985 PARADOX Borland
Interpress 1985 PostScript Warnock
BASIC 1985 QuickBASIC Microsoft
1986 Miranda David Turner at University of Kent
1986 LabVIEW National Instruments
SIMULA 67 1986 Eiffel Meyer
1986 Informix-4GL Informix
C 1986 PROMAL
Smalltalk 1987 Self (concept) Sun Microsystems Inc.
* 1987 HyperTalk Apple
* 1987 SQL-87
C, sed, awk, sh 1987 Perl Wall
MATLAB 1988 Octave
dBase-III 1988 dBase-IV
Awk, Lisp 1988 Tcl Ousterhout
REXX 1988 Object REXX Simon Nash
Ada 1988 SPARK Bernard A. Carré
Turbo Pascal 1989 Turbo Pascal OOP Borland
C 1989 Standard C89/90 ANSI X3.159-1989 (adopted by ISO in 1990)
Modula-2 1989 Modula-3 Cardeli, et al.
Modula-2 1989 Oberon Wirth

1990s
Oberon 1990 Object Oberon Wirth
APL, FP 1990 J Iverson, R. Hui at Iverson Software
Miranda 1990 Haskell
1984 MUMPS 1990 1990 MUMPS
Fortran 77 1991 Fortran 90
Object Oberon 1991 Oberon-2 Wirth
ABC 1991 Python Van Rossum
1991 Q
QuickBASIC 1991 Visual Basic Alan Cooper at Microsoft
SQL-87 1992 SQL-92
Turbo Pascal OOP 1992 Borland Pascal
ksh 1993? Z Shell (zsh)
Smalltalk 1993? Self (implementation) Sun Microsystems Inc.
Forth 1993 FALSE Oortmerrsen
FALSE 1993 Brainfuck Mueller
HyperTalk 1993 Revolution Transcript
HyperTalk 1993 AppleScript Apple
APL, Lisp 1993 K Whitney
Smalltalk, Perl 1993 Ruby
1993 Lua Waldemar Celes et al. at Tecgraf, PUC-Rio
C 1993 ZPL Chamberlain et al. at University of Washington
Lisp 1994 Dylan many people at Apple Computer
Ada 83 1995 Ada 95 ISO
Borland Pascal 1995 Delphi Anders Hejlsberg at Borland
C, SIMULA67 OR C++, Smalltalk 1995 Java James Gosling at Sun Microsystems
1990MUMPS 1995 1995 MUMPS
Self, Java 1995? LiveScript Brendan Eich atNetscape
Fortran 90 1996 Fortran 95
REXX 1996 NetRexx Cowlishaw
LiveScript 1997? JavaScript Brendan Eich at Netscape
SML 84 1997 SML 97
PHP 3 1997 PHP
Scheme 1997 Pico Free University of Brussels

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Smalltalk-80, Self 1997 Squeak Smalltalk Alan Kay, et al. at Apple Computer
JavaScript 1997? ECMAScript ECMA TC39-TG1
C++, Standard C 1998 Standard C++ ANSI/ISO Standard C++
Prolog 1998 Erlang Open Source Erlang at Ericsson
Standard C89/90 1999 Standard C99 ISO/IEC 9899:1999

2000s
FP, Forth 2000 Joy von Thun
C, C++ 2000 D Walter Bright at Digital Mars
C, C++, Java 2000 C# Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft (ECMA)
Whitespace 2003 Whitespace Brady and Morris
Perl, C++ 2003 S2 Fitzpatrick, Atkins
C#, ML, MetaHaskell 2003 Nemerle University of Wroclaw
J, FL, K 2003 NGL E. Herrera at Tlällian
Joy, Forth, Lisp 2003 Factor Slava Pestov
Fortran 95 2004 Fortran 2003
Python, C#, Ruby 2004 Boo Rodrigo B. de Oliveira

3.3. History of Operating System

The history of computer operating systems recapitulates to a degree, the recent history of computing.
Operating systems provide a set of functions needed and used by most applications, and provide the
necessary linkages to control a computer's hardware. Without an operating system, each program
would have to have drivers for your video card, sound card, hard drive, and other peripherals.

3.3.1. The mainframe era

Early operating systems were very diverse, with each vendor producing one or more operating
systems specific to their particular hardware. This state of affairs continued until the 1960s when
IBM developed the System/360 series of machines; although there were enormous performance
differences across the range, all the machines ran essentially the same operating system, OS/360.

OS/360 evolved to become successively MFT, MVT, SVS, MVS, MVS/XA , MVS/ESA , OS/390 and z/OS,
that includes the UNIX kernel as well as a huge amount of new functions required by modern mission-
critical applications running on the zSeries mainframes .

3.3.2. Minicomputers and the rise of UNIX

The UNIX operating system was developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Because it was essentially
free in early editions, easily obtainable, and easily modified, it achieved wide acceptance. It also
became a requirement within the Bell systems operating companies. Since it was written in a high
level language, when that language was ported to a new machine architecture it was also able to be
ported. This portability permitted it to become the choice for a second generation of minicomputers
and the first generation of workstations. By widespread use it exemplified the idea of a operating
system that was conceptually the same across various hardware platforms. It still was owned by
AT&T and that limited its use to groups or corporations who could afford to license it.

3.3.3. The personal computer era: Apple, DOS and beyond

The development of microprocessors made inexpensive computing available for the small business and
hobbyist, which in turn led to the widespread use of interchangeable hardware components using a
common interconnection (such as the S-100, SS-50, Apple II, ISA , and PCI buses ), and an increasing
need for 'standard' operating systems to control them. The most important of the early OSes on these
machines was Digital Research's CP/M-80 for the 8080 / 8085 / Z-80 CPUs. It was based on several
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Digital Equipment Corporation operating systems, mostly for the PDP-11 architecture. MS-DOS (or
PC-DOS when supplied by IBM) was based originally on CP/M-80. Each of these machines had a
small boot program in ROM which loaded the OS itself from disk.

The decreasing cost of display equipment and processors made it practical to provide graphical user
interfaces for many operating systems, such as the generic X Window System that is provided with
many UNIX systems, or other graphical systems such as Microsoft Windows , the RadioShack Color
Computer's OS-9, Commodore's AmigaOS, Level II, Apple 's Mac OS, or even IBM 's OS/2. The original
GUI was developed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the early '70s (the Alto computer system)
and imitated by many vendors.

4. History of Network
The earliest idea of a computer network intended to allow general communication between users of
various computers was the ARPANET , the world's first packet switching network, which first went online
in 1969.

The Internet's roots lie within the ARPANET, which not only was the intellectual forerunner of the
Internet, but was also initially the core network in the collection of networks in the Internet, as well
as an important tool in developing the Internet (being used for communication between the groups
working on internetworking research).

4.1. Motivation for the Internet

The need for an internetwork appeared with ARPA 's sponsorship, by Robert E. Kahn, of the development
of a number of innovative networking technologies; in particular, the first packet radio networks
(inspired by the ALOHA network), and a satellite packet communication program. Later, local area
networks (LANs) would also join the mix.

Connecting these disparate networking technologies was not possible with the kind of protocols used
on the ARPANET, which depended on the exact nature of the subnetwork. A wholly new kind of
networking architecture was needed.

4.2. Early Internet work

Kahn recruited Vint Cerf of University of California, Los Angeles to work with him on the problem, and
they soon worked out a fundamental reformulation, where the differences between network protocols
were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol, and instead of the network being responsible for
reliability, as in the ARPANET, the hosts became responsible. Cerf credits Herbert Zimmerman and
Louis Pouzin (designer of the CYCLADES network) with important influences on this design. Some
accounts also credit the early networking work at Xerox PARC with an important technical influence.

With the role of the network reduced to the bare minimum, it became possible to join almost any
networks together, no matter what their characteristics, thereby solving Kahn's initial problem. (One
popular saying has it that TCP/IP, the eventual product of Cerf and Kahn's work, will run over "two
tin cans and a string".) A computer called a gateway (later changed to router to avoid confusion with
other types of gateway) is provided with an interface to each network, and forwards packets back and
forth between them.

Happily, this new concept was a perfect fit with the newly emerging local area networks, which were
revolutionizing communication between computers within a site.

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4.3. Early growth

After ARPANET had been up and running for a decade, ARPA looked for another agency to hand
off the network to. After all, ARPA's primary business was funding cutting-edge research and
development, not running a communications utility. Eventually the network was turned over to the
Defense Communications Agency, also part of the Department of Defense.

In 1983, TCP/IP protocols replaced the earlier NCP protocol as the principal protocol of the
ARPANET; in 1984, the U.S. military portion of the ARPANet was broken off as a separate
network, the MILNET. At the same time, Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel were working on what
would become the Domain Name System.

The early Internet, based around the ARPANET, was government- funded and therefore restricted to
non-commercial uses such as research; unrelated commercial use was strictly forbidden. This
initially restricted connections to military sites and universities. During the 1980s, the connections
expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as
Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects,
or providing services to those who were.

Another branch of the U.S. government, the National Science Foundation, became heavily involved
in Internet research in the mid-1980s. The NSFNet backbone, intended to connect and provide access
to a number of supercomputing centers established by the NSF, was established in 1986.
At the end of the 1980s, the U.S. Department of Defense decided the network was developed enough
for its initial purposes, and decided to stop further funding of the core Internet backbone. The
ARPANET was gradually shut down (its last node was turned off in 1989), and NSF, a civilian
agency, took over responsibility for providing long-haul connectivity in the U.S.

In another NSF initiative, regional TCP/IP-based networks such as NYSERNet (New York State
Education and Research Network) and BARRNet (Bay Area Regional Research Network), grew up
and started interconnecting with the nascent Internet. This greatly expanded the reach of the rapidly
growing network. On April 30, 1995 the NSF privatized access to the network they had created. It
was at this point that the growth of the Internet really took off.

4.4. Commercialization and privatization

Parallel to the Internet, other networks were growing. Some were educational and centrally-
organized like BITNET and CSNET . Others were a grass-roots mix of school, commercial, and hobby
like the UUCP network.

During the late 1980s the first Internet Service Provider (ISP) companies were formed. Companies like
PSINet, UUNET , Netcom, and Portal were formed to provide service to the regional research networks
and provide alternate network access (like UUCP-based email and Usenet News) to the public. The
first dial- up ISP, world.std.com, opened in 1989.

The interest in commercial use of the Internet became a hotly-debated topic. Although commercial
use was forbidden, the exact definition of commercial use could be unclear and subjective. Everyone
agreed that one company sending an invoice to another company was clearly commercial use, but
anything less was up for debate. The alternate networks, like UUCP, had no such restrictions, so
many people were skirting grey areas in the interconnection of the various networks.

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Many university users were outraged at the idea of non-educational use of their networks. Ironically
it was the commercial Internet service providers who brought prices low enough that junior colleges
and other schools could afford to participate in the new arenas of education and research.

By 1994, the NSFNet lost its standing as the backbone of the Internet. Other competing commercial
providers created their own backbones and interconnections. Regional NAPs (network access points )
became the primary interconnections between the many networks. The NSFNet was dropped as the
main backbone, and commercial restrictions were gone.

4.5. Early applications

E-mail existed as a message service on early time-sharing mainframe computers connected to a number
of terminals. Around 1971 it developed into the first system of exchanging addressed messages
between different, networked computers; in 1972 Ray Tomlinson introduced the "name@computer"
notation that is still used today. E- mail turned into the Internet "killer application " of the 1980s.

The early e- mail system was not limited to the Internet. Gateway machines connected Internet SMTP
e-mail with UUCP mail, BITNET , the Fidonet BBS network, and other services. Commercial e- mail
providers such as CompuServe and The Source could also be reached.

The second most popular application of the early Internet was Usenet, a system of distributed
discussion groups which is still going strong today. Usenet had existed even before the internet, as an
application of Unix computers connected by telephone lines via UUCP. The Network News Transfer
Protocol (NNTP), similar in flavor to SMTP, slowly replaced UUCP for the relaying of news articles.
Today, almost all Usenet traffic is carried over high-speed NNTP servers.

Other early protocols include the File Transfer Protocol (1985), and Telnet (1983), a networked terminal
emulator allowing users on one computer to log in to other computers.

4.6. Host naming and the DNS

One of the scalability limitations of the early Internet was that there was no distributed way to name
hosts, other than with their IP addresses. The Network Information Centre (NIC) maintained a central
hosts file , giving names for various reachable hosts. Sites were expected to download this file
regularly to have a current list of hosts.

In 1984, Paul Mockapetris devised the Domain Name System (DNS) as an alternative. Domain name s (like
"wikipedia.org") provided names for hosts that were both globally unique (like IP addresses),
memorable (like hostnames), and distributed -- sites no longer had to download a hosts file.

Domain names quickly became a feature of e- mail addresses -- replacing the older bang path notation -
- as well as other services. Many years later, they would become the central part of the World Wide
Web's URLs, for which see below.

4.7. Standards and control

The Internet has developed a significant subculture dedicated to the idea that the Internet is not
owned or controlled by any one person, company, group, or organization. Nevertheless, some
standardization and control is necessary for anything to function.

Many people wanted to put their ideas into the standards for communication between the computers
that made up this network, so a system was devised for putting forward ideas. One would write one's

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ideas in a paper called a "Request for Comments " (RFC for short), and let everyone else read it. People
commented on and improved those ideas in new RFCs.

With its basis as an educational research project, much of the documentation was written by students
or others who played significant roles in developing the network (as part of the original Network
Working Group) but did not have official responsibility for defining standards. This is the reason for
the very low-key name of "Request for Comments" rather than something like "Declaration of
Official Standards".

The first RFC (RFC1) was written on April 7th, 1969. As of 2004 there are over 3500 RFCs,
describing every aspect of how the Internet functions.

The liberal RFC publication procedure has engendered confusion about the Internet standardization
process, and has led to more formalization of official accepted standards. Acceptance of an RFC by
the RFC Editor for publication does not automatically make the RFC into a standard. It may be
recognized as such by the IETF only after many years of experimentation, use, and acceptance have
proven it to be worthy of that designation. Official standards are numbered with a prefix "STD" and
a number, similar to the RFC naming style. However, even after becoming a standard, most are still
commonly referred to by their RFC number.

The Internet standards process has been as innovative as the Internet technology. Prior to the
Internet, standardization was a slow process run by committees with arguing vendor-driven factions
and lengthy delays. In networking in particular, the results were monstrous patchworks of bloated
specifications.

The fundamental requirement for a networking protocol to become an Internet standard is the
existence of at least two existing, working implementations that inter-operate with each other. This
makes sense in retrospect, but it was a new concept at the time. Other efforts built huge
specifications with many optional parts and then expected people to go off and implement them, and
only later did people find that they did not inter-operate, or worse, the standard was completely
impossible to implement.

In the 1980s, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) documented a new effort in
networking called Open Systems Interconnect or OSI. Prior to OSI, networking was completely
vendor-developed and proprietary. OSI was a new industry effort, attempting to get everyone to
agree to common network standards to provide multi- vendor interoperability. The OSI model was
the most important advance in teaching network concepts. However, the OSI protocols or "stack"
that were specified as part of the project were a bloated mess. Standards like X.400 for e- mail took
up several large books, while Internet e- mail took only a few dozen pages at most in RFC-821 and
822. Most protocols and specifications in the OSI stack, such as token-bus media, CLNP packet
delivery, FTAM file transfer, and X.400 e-mail, are long-gone today; in 1996, ISO finally
acknowledged that TCP/IP had won and killed the OSI project. Only one OSI standard, X.500
directory service, still survives with significant usage, mainly because the original unwieldy protocol
has been stripped away and effectively replaced with LDAP.

Some formal organization is necessary to make everything operate. The first central authority was
the NIC (Network Information Centre) at SRI (Stanford Research Ins titute in Menlo Park,
California).

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